pronouncements collectively known to the public. It is that fact which renders his book so valuable an addition to the literature of the time. Besides, there is, in so far as we know, no writer, ancient or modern, who has so fully as our author vindicated for human traditions-and of human traditions only we speak throughout their proper place in what may be called the loci scientifici. On this matter the following passages (pages 118, 119) will be found very suggestive:

The special intervention (says Lord Arundell) which appears to me destined to bring the various sciences into harmony, will be the elevation of the particular department of history or archaeology which has to do with the traditions of the human race as to its origin into a separate and recognized branch of inquiry; and I am satisfied that if any portion of that intellect which is cunning in the reconstruction of the mastodon from its vertebral bone, had been directed to the great lines of human tradition, that enough of the reliquiæ and vestiges of the past remain to establish their conformity with that which alone has solved the problem-the Book of Genesis; and which, apart from the consideration of its inspiration, will ever remain the most venerable and best attested of human records. This inquiry [the inquiry into human traditions] might no doubt form a department either of scriptural exegesis, universal history, or of ethnological research; but, in point of fact, its scope is too large practically to fall within such limits, whereas, if it were recognized as a separate branch of study, it would, I venture to think, in the progress of its investigation bring all these different branches of inquiry into harmony and completeness. And I further contend that the conclusions thus attained are as well deserving of consideration as the conclusions of science from the implements of the drift. . . . So that when on one side it is said that science (meaning the science of geology or philology, &c.) has proved this or that fact apparently contrary to the Scripture narrative, it can on the other hand be asserted that the facts, or the inferences from them, are incompatible with the testimony of the science of tradition.

And Lord Arundell declares his conviction that even the tradition of usages found in the various families of the human race would enable us to establish the main points of human history:

The Fall, the Deluge, the Dispersion, the early knowledge and civilization of mankind, the primitive monotheism, the confusion of tongues, the family system, marriages, the institution of property, the tradition of a common morality, and of the law of nations.

One of the most curious chapters in Lord Arundell's book is that on "Primitive Life," especially when read in connection with another chapter,-"Sir John Lubbock on Tradition." The first two chapters are, as we shall see, not quite in their proper place, unless they be regarded as purely introductory, and the chapter on

"Primitive Life" is that which logically holds first place in the volume. It is a most interesting and most instructive chapter. Our author maintains, as most Christians would be likely to maintain, that mankind commenced well; that both in the days of Adam and in the days of Noah, men had a high degree both of natural and of supernatural knowledge; and that savagery, wherever found, is ultimately the result of ancestral degeneration. On the other hand, modern men of science, even those who believe that Mr. Darwin means nothing but rivalry of Artemus Ward, entertain very generally an opinion precisely the opposite. According to them, the race commenced with savagery, or worse: "Mankind was for a long period living in a state of promiscuity, little, if at all, elevated above the brute"; and "men appeared originally upon the scene as a mass of units coming into the world, no one knows how, like locusts rising about the horizon or covering the earth, perhaps, like toads after a shower." In discussing this theory of primitive savagery, Lord Arundell is obliged to notice the exposition of it by a Mr. M'Lennan, and it is the charming originality of that gentleman, quite worthy of primeval times, that makes the discussion especially piquant. We recommend Mr. M'Lennan, for his soul's comfort, to read our author's third chapter. We think it will enable him to renounce his famous distinction between "exogamy,"-marriage outside your tribe,-and "endogamy, marriage with one of your own people. That will, we are aware, be so much valuable Greek gone for nothing, and accordingly we so far commiserate Mr. M'Lennan. But the loss to the scholar will be a gain to the man. The wholesale female infanticide and wife-capture committed by his ancestors will have no power to harrow his scientific feelings any more.

In the same chapter on "Primitive Life," our author touches on another question which he treats at large in a subsequent chapter ("Chronology from the Point of View of Science," page 72). It is not at all as novel as the theme immortalized by Mr. M'Lennan ; in fact it has been so long before the public as to have become somewhat stale. Nevertheless, as we have never seen it handled quite to our satisfaction, and as our author appears to have no doubt that his book has settled it for ever, we beg to call our readers' attention to it here. It arises from a fundamental assumption on the part of modern scientific inquirers that man must have progressed and developed to the point at which we see him (page 72). According to the Bible narrative, man has not been upon the earth for more than six thousand years. But Baron Bunsen says that to account for man's position, even as he is found at the birth of our Lord, at least twenty thousand years must be supposed to have intervened between that event and the Deluge. Sir Charles Lyell speaks of "the vastness of the time" required for man's development into

his present condition, and affirms that "six thousand years are but a small portion of the time required to bring about such wide divergence from a common stock as between the Negroes and Greeks and Jews, Mongols and Hindoos, represented on the Egyptian monuments." The difficulty then, put simply, is, that according to the Bible all men are descendants of a single pair, and that it is not quite six thousand years since that pair were created; that all the differences by which the races of men differ from one another must have arisen therefore within six thousand years; and that six thousand years is very much too short a period for the occurrence of such extraordinary changes as must be admitted. If the Negro type was the original, it took myriads of years to introduce the Caucasian: if the Caucasian was the first, it took myriads of years to introduce the Negro. As a matter of fact we can prove that changes of type are, if any, so slow as to afford no basis on which a calculation could be founded. From the Egyptian monuments we learn that the Negro "of the true Nigritian stamp" was in existence 2,400 years before Christ. In the four thousand years that have elapsed since then the type has remained altogether unaltered.

The author starts with a special reply addressed to Sir Charles Lyell. We confess that even as an argumentum ad hominem it does not seem to us satisfactory. Here it is.

race.

I have, then, only to assume one point that Sir Charles Lyell will concede, the order of progress or development to have been from black to white,—and that he will pay us the compliment of being the more favoured But of all the races that are akin to the Mongol or the Turanian, the Chinese are the whitest, and most nearly approach the European in colour. How many years, then, may we suppose that it took the Chinese to progress from the black state of the Egyptian? As many, let us conjecture, as it took the Egyptian to progress linguistically from the state of the Chinese or Mongol!

That reasoning is not of a surety crystal clear. Sir Charles Lyell would probably reply to it that Egyptian and Chinese, as it were, started equally black and equally rude in language; the Egyptian progressed in language but did not (because he stopped at home) progress in colour; the Chinese did not progress, at least very notably, in language, but (because he changed his climate, &c.) he progressed a good deal in colour. If there be any "entanglement here, it is, we think, one of Lord Arundell's own making.

Omitting this reference to Sir Charles Lyell, the author commences his answer to the proposed difficulty by stating his opinion that neither the theory of progress nor the theory of degeneration can account for the case of the Negro. He bases that position on the proven fact

That at the present time we find the Negro in the same relative position and with the same stamp of inferiority that we find indelibly impressed on him four thousand years ago. . . . . The difficulty is, that whereas climate, food, change of circumstances, have in many ways modified other races, the Negro has resisted these influences, and has remained the same Negro we find him two thousand four hundred years before the coming of our Lord.

We have hardly a doubt that both Lord Arundell's facts and Lord Arundell's reasoning are in the last degree questionable. It is certain that there were Negroes in existence four thousand years ago, and that there are Negroes exactly like them in existence to-day. But the Negroes of the present are either in the same external conditions as the Negroes of the past, or have not changed these conditions for a period sufficiently long to make the change tell. The remark about "the stamp of inferiority" being found "indelibly impressed" on the Negro of the Egyptian monuments is only rhetorical, and the use of the word "indelibly" savours too much of that class of rhetoric which Mr. Disraeli calls "heedless." The dark gentlemen on the Egyptian monuments prove nothing, for instance, against those who hold the theory of degeneration. No one, except Milton and the poets, knows to what precise type our first parents belonged; they may have been so dusky in colour that by the time the Egyptian monuments were constructed many of their descendants could have got black at their leisure. Nor, on the other hand, does Lord Arundell's reference prove anything against those who hold the progressive theory. To prove against them, a case should be shown where a tribe of Negroes settled, say in England, four thousand years ago, adopted new habits of life, and yet kept to their colour and their other characteristics through all these years. No such case, no case that has given the Negro the shadow of a chance, has ever been shown. When Lord Arundell speaks of the Negro "resisting the influences of climate, food, change of circumstances," he speaks what is either not true enough or not true at all. It is not true enough if the resistance has endured for only a comparatively short period of years; to say that the resistance has been prolonged over a period sufficiently large to justify Lord Arundell's conclusion, is not truc at all.

We make these remarks principally because we notice in our author a tendency that we do not admire. There are men, we apprehend, who, on this matter, will, though fighting for the same cause as he, be unable to accept either Lord Arundell's science or Lord Arundell's theology. These will be obliged, at least for the present, to solve the proposed difficulty in the old-fashioned way, that is, by maintaining that the colour, &c. of a people are susceptible of indefinite modification from climate and other ex

ternal conditions. But Lord Arundell has a tendency to cut that ground from under our feet. He (page 77) quotes with apparent satisfaction the testimony that "the American Indians are of a uniform copper-colour from north to south, in Canada and on the line," and argues, against Sir John Lubbock, that this case has both the qualities required by that writer, namely, lapse of time and difference of external conditions. Lord Arundell must therefore allow the inference that, according to him, the oldfashioned explanation will not suffice even for the case of the American Indians. But does he not see that this creates a new difficulty and that we shall be as much puzzled, by-and-by, by the American's redness as we have always been by the blackness of the Negro? It is true that we are acquainted with the red man for only four hundred years. But during that time he has remained, what of him has remained at all, unchanged in hue Whenever and wherever he first got his redness he has it for four hundred years, and in so far as we can judge would, if left to enjoy his hunting-grounds, keep it for ever. We are not asking Lord Arundell to put stopper on truth. If the colour of a race be in its destiny and not in its external conditions, directly caused by miracle and not by natural agencies, by all means let that fact be proclaimed. But, "entia non sunt multiplicanda præter necessitatem." First of all let that fact be proved.

The author's own solution of the difficulty is that proposed by De Maistre, or rather, we should say, popularized by De Maistre, for it was entertained by Schoolmen centuries before De Maistre was born. As stated by the author, it extends over more than a dozen pages of close and elaborate and very able reasoning. In brief it is this. Chanaan, the son of Cham (for present purposes Cham himself need not be disturbed), was cursed by his grandfather Noah. What were the effects of the curse has ever been a vexed question with Scriptural students. That it had one effect, the making the posterity of Chanaan in some way subject to the children of Japheth is sufficiently evident from the Scriptural text, though how far in the posterity of Chanaan that effect was to extend,-for four generations or for forty, cannot be determined. That it had any other effect whatever is extremely uncertain. But Lord Arundell, following De Maistre, contends that it had a second effect, and that too a much more striking effect than the first. He maintains that, by the curse of Noah, Chanaan and Chanaan's posterity were stamped with "the stamp of inferiority," indelible blackness; that as the hands of the Patriarch were raised in malediction, the colour of Chanaan underwent an awful change, and he stood suddenly before his brethren cursed with the characteristics which made him the fit progenitor of a new, unnatural, and hideous race. This theory, Lord Arundell says, "is adequate to the